Memory Leak. Still?

LilChihuahua · June 2014

Have they not fixed the memory leak issue yet? Or is it just me? This has been going on since the Craglorn patch. I'm still getting frequent crashes and black screens. Tried running in admin and Win7 compatibility mode none of those helped.

I'm on PC and play on maxed out so specs and RAM are not the problem.

eventHandler · June 2014

They have not fixed it. I have crash dumps if you want them, ZOS. It is very consistent that the game gets to about 3.5GB of system memory committed and then crashes (presumably the other 0.5GB of virtual address space is reserved for the OS). It takes a few hours, but it happens every time.

This happens with or without addons. I have 24GB of system memory and x64bit OS and chip architecture. I have crash dumps with and without heaps, but with heaps makes them well over a GB in size so I don't want to send that data if its not going to be used. Normal crash dumps are just around 30KB. I have done a memory analysis, and the memory leaking is all going to the heap. I can send the VMMap files showing the memory usage at the time of the crashes (these are around 30MB). I just don't know where to send these things or if they would be used at all.

It has nothing at all to do with my system or my drivers. This is a clear and simple memory leak, and extremely reproducible. It is not triggered by anything in specific in the game, it simply accumulates over time until using up all VM allowed. Rather than having any exception checks and flushing memory, the game simply crashes. Please implement some basic error checking in the mean time until the underlying memory leak is addressed.

Also, please implement emergency write to disk of all client side user data when the game signals an unexpected error or crash (the crash report system pops up, so I know you already can tell when a crash occurs) so that we don't lose addon data accumulated since the last reloadui or logout to save it to disk.

Sometimes I can log back in fine, but other times this happens: first login attempt will time out, 2nd will produce error 303, and then third attempt will work normally. I would speculate that it seems the fix for the 303 error is to do something to reset whatever is blocking the player logging in whenever the error is signaled, rather than address the underlying cause of the error.

Edit: My crash dumps are generated using MS Visual Studio 2012 Professional to debug eso.exe at the time of crashes (0xC0000005 exceptions), and my VMMaps are captured using VMMap v3.11 from the windows sysinternals by Mark Russinovich and Bryce.

I am not talking about just the basic bug reports that the game generates on crashes (which I send in every time).

eventHandler · June 2014

I was searching for memory leak and found this thread. I didn't realize it was in the PTS section. My remarks are related to the live NA server.

I'd also like to add more speculation on the cause of the problem. Since not everyone experiences this memory leak, its plausible that it could be related to our accounts for those of us who do have the issue. I'll add that I was one of the people unable to log in for several days due to the 303 error, which may or may not be relevant.

It is possible at some point some junk data became associated with our accounts, and now the server sends more junk data to us every time the game requests something legitimate or does a tick update, et cetera. For example, we may have some junk pointer that keeps making new copies in memory of our inventory or mail (this is just an example), and then the old copies are left with no pointer and never cleaned up by any garbage collection (ie a memory leak). Maybe our index is off by one for something equally mundane, and every time a new list is attached to the wrong spot which keeps being pushed further and further off where its supposed to be stored.

That's a basic example of how a memory leak can (and does) exist, while still not affecting everyone and not being related to hardware/software at all (which may or may not be the case here). And in the example, its not even an issue with the client per se, unless you count the lack of error checking (which one should, since it should be the client that checks for whether or not it needed something and not the server deciding whether or not to send another copy, that way the extra work is on the client side and thus less drain on the server).

That's the gist of the situation and possible (broadly speaking) causes.

eventHandler · June 2014

I launched the game about 40 minutes ago (after another routine crash), just before tabbing over to check for topics on the memory leak problem. I'm now up to 2.95GB being used by eso.exe. That's a lot of bloat already, probably a GB or more, and we have 0.55GB to go for the next crash. I might post a follow up on when that happens. And it has been accumulating with the game tabbed out for a good chunk of that ~40 minutes.

eventHandler · June 2014

After the game crashed half an hour ago, I noticed the crash report said "client.renderertype = D3D9." Sure enough, when I looked in UserSettings.txt, it was now "SET GraphicsDriver.7 "D3D9."" This somehow was changed from d3d11 when Craglorn came out, apparently, since that's when the crashing started.

When I load up the game with d3d9, right when I get into the game my system ram usage for eso.exe is around 2.5GB every time. When I start the game with d3d11, it's under 1.2GB when I'm first loaded onto a character.

Usually games have to duplicate the video memory in system memory when using d3d9 (Skyrim for example). So, the d3d9 render system seems to be involved in one memory leak. I'll update on whether or not I still have crashes with d3d11 set in UserSettings.txt and on what the memory usage does over time. That would also be another reason not everyone is having this problem, if most people are set to d3d11. I have no idea how mine was changed other than it must have happened when Craglorn came out.

Katniss_Everlark · June 2014

Memory leak has been making my computer shut itself down completely. Best part it only happens when the game is open. I've had it happen with TeamSpeak open but the main thing here is 95% of the time I have nothing else open. I'd love for this to be fixed so I can stop restarting my computer every few hours.